Ceiling mounted curtain tracks have been adopted for a variety of uses including travelling curtains such as those used in hospitals to establish privacy for certain spaces such as the area around a patient's bed. But the loading and unloading of curtain carriers posed a difficulty because these tracks were adjacent to the ceiling and access to them frequently required a ladder or stepstool which in turn posed a safety risk.
A system was developed in which a portion of the curtain track was hinged so that it could swing down from the ceiling and provide easier access. Curtains attached to carriers adapted to be loaded on the curtain track could be more easily suspended from or removed from such ceiling tracks by sliding these carriers on to the hinged section which had been lowered. Once the curtains were thus loaded onto the lowered hinged section, it could be swung into alignment with the rest of the track and a portion of the carriers from which the curtains were suspended could be slid on to the rest of the track by grasping the suspended curtains without the necessity of being adjacent to the ceiling. Such an approach is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,599,763.
However, such an approach required a mechanism to secure the hinged section when it was in alignment with the balance of the track and a latching mechanism was developed which interacted with a fixed bracket as described in the above mentioned patent. Persons operating this latching mechanism while standing on the floor faced in accordance with its intended use faced some difficulties. Among others it was not easy to tell if the mechanism had been locked against release of the hinged section and the mechanism did not always readily latch when the hinged section was brought into contact with the fixed bracket.
Therefore there was a need for a locking mechanism which functioned in this environment in a simple and reliable manner to lock and release the hinged section and give a clear and unambiguous indication when the mechanism was locked to the fixed bracket.